Future Fluent

Do you trust AI? And if you don’t, what should you do? That’s the heart of this wide-ranging conversation between leading education policy advocate, Erin Mote, and Future Fluent’s Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran. Interacting with AI, Erin says, is "like conversing with a brilliant person you cannot trust." But Erin doesn’t stop there. She’s got a treasure trove of ideas of how to build bridges over this gap, from more robust government policy, to checklists for school leaders before they adopt AI and, crucially, for parents who want to prepare their kids to live in this complex new world. Advocate, educator, Mom: Erin brings a rich perspective to the question of how are we going to learn to live with AI. Join us. 

More to check out! 

Erin Mote shares loads of resources on LinkedIn. In addition, here are some of the resources that we talked about during this episode of Future Fluent. 

Author and commentator April Rinne writes about how to navigate change. Check out her book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (as well as some astonishing pictures of the scores of places she has done handstands!) 

 The Last Invention podcast goes through the 70-year history of artificial intelligence, including competing visions of utopia and apocalypse. 

Get all the details about EdSafe AI, including its latest white paper, S.A.F.E. by Design: Policy, Research, and Practice Recommendations for AI Companions in Education

Super handy for school leaders: This checklist (created by EdSafe) of considerations around data governance and the ethical implementation of AI. It’s called: AI in Education: Negotiating for our Future - A Checklist for K12 Districts, Dec. 2025.

The AI Civil Rights Act of 2025 was introduced in the US Congress in December 2025 and is still in committee. A bill in the Florida state Senate mirrors the approach of the congressional bill and is moving faster. It aims to create strict, state-level guardrails for AI, directly challenging federal efforts to standardize regulations and positioning Florida as a leading, skeptical regulator of the technology. 

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At the National Education Lab AI (NOLAI) in the Netherlands, director Dr. Inge Molenaar sits at the epicenter of learning, research and AI. And the Netherlands has been a leader in Europe and throughout the world in the effective use of emerging technologies, Dr. Molenaar has an exceptional vantage for observing–and influencing–the emergent use of AI in learning. This week, she joins Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran to talk about teacher and student agency, the fragile balance between learning and performance, and when AI works with teachers and students versus when it threatens to erode “self regulation.” And Jeremy poses a mind-bending question: When should a student be more like a trout?

LEARN MORE! 

A classic text for user design in the field is: Human-Centered AI, by Ben Shneiderman, Oxford University Press, June 2025. Shneiderman is a long-time leader in user design. Here Shneiderman gives an overview talk at the PSW Society (beginning at 16 minutes). 

The website for the National Education Lab AI for elementary, secondary and special needs education in the Netherlands, funded by the National Growth Fund, including its research and its ongoing school-based projects. 

The annual magazine overview of the National Education Lab in download PDF form and in English. 

Fresh for 2026! The OECD’s Digital Education Outlook. (And the webinar overview). 

Human-AI collaboration in education: The hybrid future, by Inga Molenarr, Inaugural address from Radboud University, September 2024. 

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Pat Yongpradit has been the face of Code.org for a dozen years and is a prominent, worldwide AI literacy leader. Just this month, he’s also taken on a big new leadership role at Microsoft. We we know why he's in demand: He's bracingly clear eyed about the challenges educators face in 2026 and beyond. His “6-7” predictions for 2026 suggests AI will urther distance strong performers from weaker ones–hardly a win for equity. But in this conversation with Jeremy and Betsy, he offers a path for skirting this and other “nasty unintended but not unexpected consequences."

Lots to explore! 

Want to explore more about the ideas we discussed in this episode of Future Fluent? Check out these segments: 

• Pat Yongpradit’s website with a number of videos, including a discussion with ISTE’s Joseph South,  Khan Academy’s Kristin DiCerbo, and ETS’s Narmeen Makhani on AI and the future of education  
• Teach AI’s Draft AI Literacy Framework 
• Code.org 
• Organizational Jazz: New Ways to Work Adapting in the Flows of Change, by John Seely Brown, Tom Winans and Ann Pendleton-Julllian
• Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding 
• Tools and Weapons: The promise and the peril of the digital age by Brad Smith – and the podcast, “Tools & Weapons”  
• Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella 
• Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins 

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How do you work with a "wizard"? Season two of Future Fluent kicks off with a provocative interview with Ethan Mollick, a professor, writer and deep observer of the fast evolving relationship between artificial intelligence, learning and the future of work. Agentic AI, Mollick observes, is a collection of wizards that collaborate to accomplish tasks -- even if we don't exactly understand how they do that. When should we trust wizards? What happens when we do not? And what are the implications for how we learn and teach?  

Want more? Here’s how you can follow Ethan Mollick’s work and check out other references we talk about in this show: 

• One Useful Thing: A Substack by Ethan Mollick including “On Working With Wizards” 
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick, April 2024
• GDPval, paper by OpenAI 
• Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible by Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum (1991) 
• The Bitter Lesson (in AI) by Rich Sutton, March 13, 2019
• In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power by Shoshana Zuboff, 1989. 

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So what will it take for people to be "fluent" in the future? In this wrap-up of season one, Betsy and Jeremy compare notes on what we've heard from the guests. One strong throughline: it's not the technology that matters -- it's what people do with the technology. It's how we purposefully building human agency as we experiment with this new tool. Betsy and Jeremy also talk about the questions they *didn't* explore this season -- and how to examine them in the autumn when we pick up with Season 2. Got thoughts? Drop a note on LinkedIn.

This concludes season 1 of Future Fluent. We hope you enjoyed tuning in each week, and stay posted for more exciting news soon!  

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The Gwinnett County school district in Georgia takes computer science very seriously. Its 183,000 students in 142 schools get rolling in a rigorous computer science curriculum in Kindergarten and goes through 12th grade. Even better--students are solving hands-on, real problems, says Sallie Holloway, the county's director of AI and computer science. But that's old news. In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran probe into what's next in Gwinnett--namely how they are building human-centered AI practices.

Want to dig into what’s going on in AI in Gwinnett County’s public schools? 

• Gwinnett provides an overview of its computer science and AI approach here.
• Here’s the Gwinnett County Public Schools’ Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence position document, with specific sections written for students, staff and families.  

Here’s how Gwinnett is trying to prepare students for college and technical careers. 

And finally for a few more general overviews, take a look at:  

• A feature on CBS Morning News (August 2023)    
• EdWeek: Building AI literacy, what one district has learned (2023)

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We've moved from the "age of Enlightenment" to the "Age of Entanglement," says John Seely Brown, a long-time leading thinker, technologist and scholar on learning. In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran go the source: JSB has done it all, from working at a bookie in high school to managing Xerox PARC, advising technology leaders and publishing more than 100 papers and books, many of which are on learning. JSB has spent his career experimenting -- and yes, playing -- with how the technology we build shapes the way we work and learn. What he's learned along the way? That learning, much like being part of a jazz group or surviving in the wilderness, involves constantly questioning and reexamining everything around us. "The notion of looking for the solution -- or even the (right) prompt doesn't compute anymore."

John Seely Brown has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and nine books including coauthoring the acclaimed, The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000) with Paul Duguid, which has been translated into nine languages. 

You could dip into John Seely Brown’s website, which is packed with slides from past presentations. 

Or take a look at any of these publications: 

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, 2011. 

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 1: Designing for Emergence (Infrastructures) by Ann M. Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown, 2018. 

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 2: Ecologies of Change (Infrastructures) by Ann M. Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown, 2018. 

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We know how to teach people to improve their writing--but it takes a lot of work. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy Corcoran and Jeremy Roschelle talk with Peter Gault, the founder of nonprofit Quill, which gives students feedback on 500 million sentences a year. Quill's been using AI for years and is now sharing its "playbook" on how to build ethically -- and effectively -- with AI.

Here are hefty but important resources around AI and writing.

• Let’s start with the newest one: In our interview, Peter Gault describes a playbook that ⁠Quill.org⁠ has just created describing its approach to the ethical development of AI. ⁠You can check it out here⁠. 
• We also discussed the National Reading Panel's 449-page report on what works and doesn't work in literacy. ⁠It’s a 25-year old classic and you can get it here⁠. There are a ton of great ideas in this report about how to apply AI to advance student learning.
• Journalist Peg Tyre, a long-time collaborator of Quill, wrote a powerful piece about how to teach writing, “The Writing Revolution,” for The Atlantic in 2012. ⁠Check it out here⁠. 

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This year Jeremy and Betsy travelled to San Diego to record our podcast live at ASU-GSV Summit--the industry gathering that spotlights emerging technologies for education. In the conference's "podcast zone," they talked with Jason Green, cofounder of YourWay Learning. The conversation focused on the hardest aspect of emerging technology--changing the culture of teaching and learning. How can educators feel "safe" to try new practices? And could a simple paper sign, posted on class door, change school culture? Join us to learn what the paper sign said and how it helped educators to become better innovators.

• Blended Learning in Action: A practical Guide Toward Sustainable Change by Catlin R. Tucker, Tiffany Wycoff and Jason T. Green. Ideas, examples and tips for how to use technology to reach students. 
• Machines of Loving Grace, an essay by Dario Amodie, cofounder of Anthropic. Unfortunately, it seems to have vanished from the web. Here is Fast Company’s assessment of the essay. 
• One Useful Thing, a substack by Ethan Mollick  
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by Ethan Mollick
• King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. A riveting account of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. This won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

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Many companies are building tutors. To build a good tutor requires figuring out students already know and what they are learning. Is AI up to this task? On this episode, Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran plunge into the murky issues around using AI for assessment with Kristen DiCerbo, the chief learning officer at Khan Academy. Kristen shares why game-based assessments haven’t yet become the best way to measure students’ learning. And we ask: How optimistic should we be that AI can improve assessment over the next 10 years? Tune in for an expert perspective on the hope and hype of using technology to measure learning.

If you’d like to go deeper and explore issues around assessment, check out these resources! 

• Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), by Salman Khan 
• Psychometric Considerations in Game-Based Learning by Robert J. Mislevy, et.al., 2016.   
• Focus on Formative Feedback by Valerie J. Shute, March 2008
• The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don’t Have to Be by Anya Kamenetz, 2016.  
• The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann, 1999 
• Playful Testing: Designing a Formative Assessment Game for Data Science by an interdisciplinary team including Jeremy Roschelle, 2022  

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